A blog on the current crises in the Middle East and news accounts unpublished by the US press. Daily timeline of events in Iraq as collected from stories and dispatches in the French and Italian media: Le Monde (Paris), Il Corriere della Sera (Milan), La Repubblica (Rome), L'Orient-Le Jour (Beirut) and occasionally from El Mundo (Madrid).

Monday, November 07, 2005

Italy's RAI News 24 To Broadcast Proof of Use by the US Miliary of Chemical Weapons in Massacre

Liberal Avenger has the .pdf file of an article which appeared in Field Artillery Magazine describing the use of WP in Fallujah.

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Update: Apparently, the program is downloadable here. I'm told that it is very graphic, so beware! In the program Jeff Englehart and Garett Reppenhagen, veterans of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq confirm the use of WP.

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Shocking revelation RAI News 24. Use of chemical weapons by the US military in Iraq. Veteran admits: Bodies melted away before our eyes.

White phosphorous used on the civilian populace: This is how the US “took” Fallujah.

New formulation of napalm also used.

ROME. In soldier slang they call it Willy Pete (sic) [Whiskey Pete] The technical name is white phosphorus. In theory its purpose is to illumine enemy positions in the dark. In practice, it was used as a chemical weapon in the rebel stronghold of Fallujah. And it was used not only against enemy combatants and guerrillas, but again innocent civilians. The Americans are responsible for a massacre using unconventional weapons, the identical charge for which Saddam Hussein stands accused. An investigation by RAI News 24, the all news Italian television channel, has pulled the veil from one of the most carefully concealed mysteries from the front in the entire US military campaign in Iraq.

A US veteran of the Iraq war told RAI New correspondent Sigfrido Ranucci this: I received the order to use caution because we had used white phosphorus on Fallujah. In military slag it is called 'Willy Pete'. Phosphorus burns the human body—it even melts it right down to the bone.

RAI News 24’s investigative story, Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre, will be broadcast tomorrow on RAI-3 and will contain not only eye-witness accounts by US military personnel but those from Fallujah residents. A rain of fire descended on the city. People who were exposed to that multicolored substance began to burn. We found people with bizarre wounds-their bodies burned but their clothes intact, relates Mohamad Tareq al-Deraji, a biologist and Fallujah resident.

I gathered accounts of the use of phosphorus and napalm from a few Fallujah refugees whom I met before being kidnapped, says Manifesto reporter Giuliana Sgrena, who was kinapped in Fallujah last February, in a recorded interview. I wanted to get the story out, but my kidnappers would not permit it.

RAI News 24 will broadcast video and photographs taken in the Iraqi city during and after the November 2004 bombardment which prove that the US military, contrary to statements in a December 9 2004 communiqué from the US Department of State, did not use phosphorus to illuminate enemy positions (which would have been legitimate) but instead dropped white phosphorus indiscriminately and in massive quantities on the city’s neighborhoods.

In the investigative story, produced by Maurizio Torrealta, dramatic footage is shown revealing the effects of the bombardment on civilians, women and children, some of whom were surprised in their sleep.

The investigation will also broadcast documentary proof of the use in Iraq of a new formulation of napalm called MK77. The use of the incendiary substance on civilians is forbidden by a 1980 UN treaty. The use of chemical weapons is forbidden by a treaty which the US signed in 1997.

Fallujah. La strage nascosta [Fallujah, The Concealed Massacre] will be shown on RAI News tomorrow November 8th at 07:35 (via HOT BIRDTM statellite, Sky Channel 506 and RAI-3), and rebroadcast by HOT BIRDTM satellite and Sky Channel 506 at 17:00 [5 pm] and over the next two days.

23 Comments:

Anonymous said...

Last night (Sunday, November 6th) there was a two-hour docu-drama about the assault on Faluja. Its eyewitnesses said that the battle, which went on for days, always stopped at nightfall because the insurgents did not seem to want to fight in the dark, perhaps to avoid giving away their positions. They went to ground at sunset and came back to fight at sunrise.

If there was no enemy activity to illuminate, why was there the need to use illumination devices?

How soon will the whole Bush cabal be put on trial for war crimes and atrocities and crimes against humanity? And how center-of-Dante's- Inferno sick/evil is it to use the WMD threat excuse to attack a country and then use same on the populace?

The combatants have to warn the population and let them time to get out.

----google is your friend

White Phosphorous anti riot or WP surpression riot grenade

----many weapons need a reaction. WP is not classed has a chemical and it is allowed to be used against Military.Military cant use them against civilians because they cant use any weapon against civilians unless disobyed (Of course only if the orders are inside the occupying power duties of Geneva convention)

The use of incendiary bombs against civilian targets or concentrations of civilians with no military function is forbidden by Protocol III of the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. Although the US ratified Protocols I and II of the Convention, it does not appear to have adopted Protocol III into US law.

There also exists a Convention on the prohibition of the development, production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons and on their destruction, Paris 13 January 1993, which went into effect in 1997 and which the United States signed.

I also liked this from Prof. Cole:

The lessons of British Iraq were mostly unknown to the American politicians who planned out and executed the 2003 Iraq War. One of them is that the military occupation of a conquered population is a barbaric business and can easily draw the colonizer into the use of horrific means to control the rebellious occupied. The Americans' moral fibre is being destroyed from within by things like Abu Ghraib, Fallujah, and other atrocities. In the end, America may not any longer be America. The country that began by forbidding cruel and unusual punishment is ending by formally authorizing torture on a grand scale, and by burning small town Iraqis down to the bone with white phosphorus.

hmmmm. guess those resistance fighter sites i was reading back during the 'liberation of fallujah' were telling the truth. napalm and 'acid clouds'. how wonderful of us to bring demon.ocracy to those poor people.

You have to be a total idiot to believe the U.S. military would use WP as a chemical weapon, in this or any other situation. First, it goes against everything U.S. officers are trained to do. I was a fully trained U.S. combat officer and I was never trained to do anything with chemical weapons but survive them. Second, even if you tried to order the use of WP as a weapon, everyone around, below and above you has been trained in what a "legal" and what an "illegal" order is. SO many would recognize this as an illegal order, that you could never get it executed on any scale. Thridly, with so many reporters imbedded with U.S. units it is virtually impossible to commit a war crime of this scope. Why go on, if you believe this, no fact will change your mind and you will be believe anything.

You have to be a total idiot to believe the U.S. military would use WP as a chemical weapon, in this or any other situation. First, it goes against everything U.S. officers are trained to do. I was a fully trained U.S. combat officer and I was never trained to do anything with chemical weapons but survive them. Second, even if you tried to order the use of WP as a weapon, everyone around, below and above you has been trained in what a "legal" and what an "illegal" order is. SO many would recognize this as an illegal order, that you could never get it executed on any scale.

You'd have to be a total hermit to have not noticed during the last couple of years that US military personnel have done things that are illegal - routinely, on a fairly wide scale and without apparent concern for human decency.

You might want to desperately disbelieve the facts, but that doesn't change the facts. Get your head out of the sand.

(1) Anonymous was never trained to do anything with chemical weapons, but earlier said WP was not a chemical weapon, so perhaps he does not know what he was trained in. Ambiguity leads to an ability to rationalize.

(2) U.S. soldiers are trained not to do certain things. Ergo you cannot get those things to happen on any scale. Sounds logical but it conflicts with the fact that certain things U.S. soldiers are not supposed to do keep happening on a broad scale, from mistreatment of detainees to stupid, trigger happy responses to being fired upon, to use of illegal weapons. Embedded reporters described units on the verge of the Fallujah attack as eager to go in and avenge humiliating losses. New York Times coverage showed them vexed and humiliated at every turn upon moving in. I think it would be asy to wink at use of a legal incendiary for illumination that was actually an illegal anti-personnel weapon. Again, ambiguity leads to an ability to rationalize.

(3) If there are embedded reporters with the troops, feeling like part of the invading force, subject to military control, going only where they are allowed, and reporting only what they are allowed, and the area is too dangerous for independent reporters, then I think we expect to see exactly the reporting we did see: scattered reports of use of napalm-like weapons, but no sustained coverage by major U.S. media. The observations that were reported were too isolated or ambiguous. Ambiguity leads to an ability to rationalize.

WP is not a chemical weapon(This is a staement from the organization that clasifies chemical weapons). Another thing that is wrong about this article is that the treaty that banned the use of WP was not signed by the USA, Israel, and Turkey(there is another country, but I don't remember which one was)